Antiproliferative activity of Camellia sinensis mediated silver nanoparticles on three different human cancer cell lines.

INTRODUCTION: Cancer is one of the leading causes of mortality in the world and there are many types of cancer. The current treatments against cancer are surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy, but these come with varied side effects as they harm noncancer cells too. Therefore, search for new treatments is one of the important research areas nowadays and nanoparticles are one such potential anticancer agent. AIM OF THE STUDY: We hypothesized that silver nanoparticles and tea extract may have anticancer activities along with their synergistic counterparts with adriamycin (ADR) on HT-29 human colon cancer cell line, MCF-7 human breast cancer cell line, and MOLT-4 human leukemia cancer cell line. MATERIALS AND METHODS: The biosynthesized silver nanoparticles were characterized by ultraviolet-visible spectroscopy, nanoparticle tracking analyzer (NTA), X-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy, transmission electron microscopy (TEM), and Fourier transform infrared analysis. The cytotoxic activity was measured using the sulforhodamine B assay protocol on the HT-29, MCF-7, and MOLT-4 cell lines. RESULTS: The synthesized AgNPs gave absorption maxima at 415 nm, with four different diffraction peaks (°2θ values) corresponding to the face centered cubic silver lines. Our results showed that AgNPs exhibited the highest cytotoxic activity at 20 µg/mL concentration against all the three cell lines followed by the combination of AgNPs+ADR. CONCLUSION: The superior activity of the silver nanoparticles may be due to its spherical shape and smaller particle size 10-30 nm as confirmed from NTA and TEM analysis. The data obtained in the study reveal the potent therapeutic value of biogenic silver nanoparticles.